1. eliminate Daylight Savings Time2. replace all time zones with UTC so that the current time is expressed exactly the same regardless of geographic location, therefore no further need for the International Date Line (take that you smug Kiwis and Aussies!)3. there is no step three4. put NTP daemons & receivers on all digital electronic consumer products that are required to display the current time5. eliminate the concepts of AM and PM (mandatory 24-hour clock)6. profit!

That's make things really confusing. It seems like a good idea at first, but it means stores all will have to have custom hours set. You'd end up with things like "Post Offices in former CST are open from 10-6". When you travel some place you'd have to learn all the local customs. Do people here have lunch at 19 or 20? Do stores close at 01 or 03?

A better solution would be to shorten the workday. Nobody should have to work more than 6 hours anyway. Daylight 'savings' is pretty dumb. It's especially stupid in the lower latitudes. Here's looking at you, Mexico.

4. put NTP daemons & receivers on all digital electronic consumer products that are required to display the current time

That's just silly. In most of the continental US, such gadgets can already sync to WWVB to get the current UTC time (and to find out whether DST is in effect now, and whether it will be in effect 24 hours from now)*, and for most such gadgets, this simple unidirectional broadcast mechanism makes a lot more sense than NTP, which requires (1) unicast and (2) bi-directional.

The correct answer is to extend such a system world-wide with a few more transmitters, not to make every device everywhere speak IP and NTP.

*Yet, despite the bits in the time signal for exactly that purpose, I am in possession of an alarm clock that sets itself by WWVB, but has been wrong for the past two weeks, because some idiot-child programmer used a hard-coded table of start/stop dates instead of reading the current status from the signal (and using hard-coded dates as a fallback if unable to receive a WWVB frame in the 24 hours preceeding the change). This clock was sold after the most recent change in DST dates, and thus came with an extra paper in the box which explained the behavior, implied that it was Congress's fault rather than the manufacturer's, and recommending that you simply adjust the clock twice in the spring and twice in the fall. If they can't (or can't be bothered to) get this right, do you trust them with NTP?!

What order of magnitude of hours have been lost coding for DST? I'm thinking on the order of a hundred k/million hours of code lost on doing software for this. Then you also have when software isn't coded correctly, the lost of functionality. Finally you have the unwashed masses being late or early constantly.

Seems like the only reason DST is there is so the politicians can go,"Hah, look at a hoop we can make you jump through."

To accommodate them, I would consider keeping DST for the entire year.

I'd go for this - or even what the Car Talk guys referred to as "double dog daylight savings" where it's a two hour jump (but year-round, I mean).

As it is, during the winter there is a period where I leave for work while it's dark and return home afterward in the dark. To have at least a little daylight left at the end of my workday would be nice.

The concept of "DST all year round" is about the only thing more stupid than DST for half of the year. DST all year round is no DST at all, you've just moved yourself into the neigbouring time zone, nothing more.

We should just abolish time zones altogether. There is no good reason anymore not to just use UTC "universally".

Point is, time zones or no time zones will not change that sometimes when you're in the middle of the day at your place, somewhere else people are already asleep, but at least with time zones it's obvious that when someone says "it's 8am here right now", it is about breakfast time there and not in the middle of the day or the middle of the night. So time zones give you additional information which you would not have with only one universal time for the whole planet.

In fact, only using UTC would just lead to "unofficial time zone tables" which you'd use to look up at what UTC time that guy on the other side of the world starts work: "oh, Bob starts work at 1pm UTC, so I still have to wait 3 hours before I can phone him". So it would be exactly the same as it is right now ("oh, Bob's place is x hours behind us"), just that you'd have to keep track of the time difference in some other way, because the UTC time would not give you that information.

Absolutely no reason exists why we couldn't use sunset-at-7pm as the solar set-point, rather than noon.Absolutely no reason exists why we couldn't use dawn-at-7am as the solar-set-point, rather than noon.

Completely wrong. There's a very excellent reason to use noon. From noon to noon is always 24 hours, no matter what time of year it is. From dawn to dawn is *not* always 24 hours. From sunset to sunset is *not* always 24 hours. It varies throughout the year. This makes anything other than noon completely unsuitable as a set-point.